Hot July

Well, at least here in Norway. Which is great, because it means lots of time out and about in the sun, playing with my sons. It does mean that I’m doing a good deal less programming than it if were rainy and dreary, but I’m not complaining. Even if the good weather means slower progress, there is always progress.

Most of my work on new games for the past month, has been focused on Small Battles. This is because I intend the Small Battles game engine to form the core of the land combat engine for most of my future games, so getting this right is important. Keeping this in mind, has caused me to make some important changes to the game engine. The original design called for simultaneous turns, but the initial play tests and my own experimentation convinced me that this kind of phased movement (first issue orders, then see the results) is a step too abstract for many. Consequently the turn sequence is now standard I Go, You Go turns. I also streamlined a few other elements that needlessly complicated the rules, without adding any appreciable depth to the game. It’s still not as simple as I would ideally like it to be, but I think the new version is a lot more intuitive to play than the original.

Once I’m done testing it, and fixed some more bells and whistles to it, I’ll probably put it up on Google Play using the alpha test system.

In the meantime, I’m back to work on Dwarf King and Pirates and Traders 2. The former is getting a bunch of the graphics done at the moment, including some (in my completely biased opinion) really ace portraits. I’ve posted one on the facebook site, and more will come later. On Pirates and Traders 2, I’ve mostly been playing around with the map lately, ensuring that map elements display correctly. The next step will be to add actions and the status screen; or possibly to check out how big a map I can really use. I would really love to have a map including the Gulf of Mexico so that we can get places like Campeche on the game map, but there’s always the thing about app size. At those size, one can easily end up with a map that fills 15Mb all on its own – and Pirates and Traders is already a pretty big app to begin with.

I’m not completely done with vacation this summer yet, so if responses are a little slow during August, my apologies in advance. If you send me an e-mail and I don’t reply during the weekend, do feel free to ping me again.